Engineering notes
How TETHERÆ is built.
Notes on the engineering behind the product: the decisions worth explaining, and what they were weighed against.
Choosing a relay by latency, not by billing address
Why region selection is measured on the device every time, and what changed when we stopped pinning accounts to the region they signed up in.
What the relay cannot see
Precisely which facts a relay in the middle is left with when it cannot decrypt anything it carries, and why that set is as small as it is.
Sleep is the wrong primitive for a machine you want to reach
How Rest mode came about, why it is implemented four separate times, and the platform-specific ways holding a computer awake goes quietly wrong.
A tracker that does not flatter you
Counting a minute of work honestly is a design decision before it is a technical one. What we chose not to measure, and why the number is smaller for it.